March 16, 2006An Irish Face on the Cause of CitizenshipBy NINA BERNSTEIN

Rory Dolan's, a restaurant in Yonkers, was packed with hundreds of illegal Irish immigrants on that rainy Friday night in January when the Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform called its first meeting. Niall O'Dowd, the chairman, soon had them cheering.

"You're not just some guy or some woman in the Bronx, you're part of a movement," Mr. O'Dowd told the crowd of construction workers, students and nannies. He was urging them to support a piece of Senate legislation that would let them work legally toward citizenship, rather than punishing them with prison time, as competing bills would.

The govenor did something right. IF YOU ARE HERE ILLEGALLY YOU SHOULD NOT RECEIVE ANY SERVICES FRON THE CITY,TOWN STATE OR FEDERAL GOVERNMENTS.This will discourage any illegial from comint to this state and hopefully the country as a whole, whereever they come from.

Thank you Govenor Rell. See what is trying to come in and there is a La Raza in this forum. Read what she is keeping out and inform your Senators you do not want this immigration bill passed. Do it now, for they are going to pass it this week.Please check out what we are fighting and why these immigration backers keep yelling RACIST. This is the main group behind much of them. I also have added on the meanings of Communism and Proletariat to give you better understanding of who they are. This is the web page: http://www.mayorno.com/WhoIsMecha.html

Communism1. Political theory advocating community ownership of all property, the benefits of which are to be shared by all according to the needs of each. A theoretical economic system characterized by the collective ownership of property and by the organization of labor for the common advantage of all members. 2. Communism a. A system of government in which the state plans and controls the economy and a single, often authoritarian party holds power, claiming to make progress toward a higher social order in which all goods are equally shared by the people. b. The Marxist-Leninist version of Communist doctrine that advocates the overthrow of capitalism by the revolution of the proletariat.

ProletariatThe lowest or one of the lowest economic and social classes in a society. In ancient Rome the proletariat consisted of the poor landless freemen. It included artisans and small tradesmen who had been gradually impoverished by the extension of slavery. The proletariat (literally meaning “producers of offspring”) was the lowest rank among Roman citizens; the first…

Way to go Jodi! I almost forgive you for approving the requirement to report stolen guns and that embarassment you call a budget. But it's something. Plus the veto will save some bucks, or at least it will have a chance at educating Americans, who do have a right to it.

The city of Boston was an established home of anti-Irish feeling. This can be largely accredited to the large numbers of Irish immigrants that made their home in that city. By 1855, it was estimated that nearly a third of Boston’s population were foreign-born Irish – 50, 000 out of 160, 000. Boston was so Irish it was dubbed by one visitor as “the Dublin of America”. This caused a great deal of fear because people were afraid they would be overrun by Irish immigrants and they allowed political powers to be bred from it.The Know Nothing party rose to prominence at the zenith of Boston’s anti-Irish feeling in the 1840s and 50s. The party was opposed to foreign immigration, especially Irish Catholics and believed that “Americans must rule America.” In 1854, four years after it was founded, the Know Nothings boasted over one million members and had elected eight governors, more than 100 congressmen, the mayors of Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia as well as thousands of lesser officials throughout the country. Two thirds of the voters in Massachusetts voted for Know Nothing candidates. Once in power, the party passed a series of laws aimed specifically at the Irish Catholic population of Massachusetts, including compulsory readings from the King James Bible (the Protestant bible) in public schools, disbanding Irish militia units and seizing their weapons in direct violation of their Constitutional rights, and deporting poor Irish back to Britain. 295 Irish were sent back to Liverpool for being a drain on the public treasury. The Know Nothings also sought to deprive Irish Catholics of their right to vote and hold office. The Know Nothing party’s popularity was lost as easily as it was gained when in 1854 the party’s candidate was defeated in the presidential election, signaling the end of its four year reign over American politics.[none of the irish had documents when they arrived]

Congratulations. A lot of people went to college. What is going on today and what was happening in 1850 cannot be compared. We didn't have the population problems we have today. Open space is diminishing at an alarming rate--in 1850 it was still considered limitless.

The illegal aliens from Ireland in the 1850s were coming here to escape the patato famine, not leech off socal services and send american greenbacks home.

Many did receive food stams and assistance, and hence their support for the socialists. But the government wasn't the lumbering, overbloated, wasteful entity it is today. There was what, six cabinet members at the time?

We don't have the resources they did in the 1850s. We use oil today. A lot of it. It's already in short supply with creating additional demands on it.

The list goes on. You're comparing apples and oranges, despite how it looks.

Thank you Gov. Rell. Perhaps all the e-mails you got asking you to veto this bill showed that you may be listening to your residents. Illegal is illegal, there is no way to put a spin on that. No sympathy for lawbreakers.

From the very beginning of the mass migration that spanned the years (roughly) 1880 to 1924, an increasingly vociferous group of politicians and nativists demanded increased restrictions on immigration. Laws and regulations such as the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Alien Contract Labor Law and the institution of a literacy test barely stemmed this flood tide of new immigrants. Actually, the death knell for Ellis Island, as a major entry point for new immigrants, began to toll in 1921. It reached a crescendo between 1921 with the passage of the Quota Laws and 1924 with the passage of the National Origins Act. These restrictions were based upon a percentage system according to the number of ethnic groups already living in the United States as per the 1890 and 1910 Census. It was an attempt to preserve the ethnic flavor of the "old immigrants", those earlier settlers primarily from Northern and Western Europe. The perception existed that the newly arriving immigrants mostly from southern and eastern Europe were somehow inferior to those who arrived earlier.

Rell is coming back to her senses. To those of you who say the kisd did nothing wrong, so we should pay for their education, what is stopping you people from personally giving them some money (heck - clean out your bank accounts; why should you have more than them?) and pay for their education yourselves. You think they are so precious - you make the investment. America was made great through a plan of balanced moderate legal immigration - not illegal immigrants coming here and telling Americans how it is going to be from here on out.

Thanks Governor Rell, this is one of the first things you have done that I agree with. We have plenty of kids that qualify for college but can't afford it, why would we help the law breakers and ignore our legitimate citizens??

Isn't it comical, when someone wants everyone to just follow the law when entering this country, the small minds start calling names. This is simple, illegals are illegal, period. They are not immigrants, someone referenced the 1840-1850s, there was no way to get a visa at that time, you entered the country and signed the proper forms, you did not sneak in and try to blend into the population and then milk the system until it was dry.

<quoted text>Yes, legal immigrants. NOT ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS. WHAT PART OF ILLEGAL DO YOU NOT GET?moron.

George, may I make a correction to your statement? There is no such thing as an illegal immigrant, they are illegal aliens or lawbreakers. The term immigrant should be used for LEGAL IMMIGRANTS, not criminals.

Dear HOLIDAY: You are incorrect. Thanks to Connecticut and the other 49 states, children of illegal status receive FREE education up until high school like other legal status students. Remember college is optional and the children of illegal status have the SAME access to the universities as an out-of-state legal status students.

Incidentally, as a child of two immigrants from Latin America, I am saddened that the REAL issue of immigration reform gets pushed aside because it’s “too complicated”. Instead we talk about faux issues like in-state tuition and what is politically correct over the term of “illegal aliens”.

TO ALL IN-STATE-TUITION SUPPORTERS AND ACTIVISTS: Stop fighting this fight and focus your attention on the real issue of immigration reform!! Like Alejandro Amenábar’s film says, Abre tus ojos!

<quoted text>George, may I make a correction to your statement? There is no such thing as an illegal immigrant, they are illegal aliens or lawbreakers. The term immigrant should be used for LEGAL IMMIGRANTS, not criminals.

I don't want to have semantic argument with you, because you don't know what that is. But, just a heads up, you're an idiot.

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